Mellow Mushroom

Photography by Fitz

Mellow Mushroom is a pizza chain, but its stores are not cookie cutter copies of each other. At its highest level of command, M.M. believes in great pizza and good beer (fine things to believe in, I'd say!). It also believes that each restaurant should be somewhat unique. Pretty neat, eh? We ate at the Delray Beach store while vacationing in Florida, and everything about our experience there was positive. The pizza was as good as advertised, and the beer selection had me jumping up and down!

The Delray Beach Mellow Mushroom is like a sports bar, ale house, and family-friendly pizza joint all rolled into one. It's got lots of big screen TVs and tons of cool pop art (much of it mushroom themed). And let's just say I was in beer heaven when it came to the beverage selection. They had something like 49 taps, and it was almost all good stuff. They had offerings from Abita, Bells, Dogfish Head, Magic Hat, Shipyard, Avery, and a ton of other breweries I like. I ended up having a Stone Smoked Porter and a Rogue Dead Guy, two of my favorite beers ever. Tami and I continued our on-going pretzel craze by ordering the fresh dough pretzels with beer cheese for dipping. They were great! They weren't traditional pretzels like we're used to up north. They were like twisted pizza dough. Total win! And then we had pizza, which came in perfect little personal sizes (10 inches - they also had two larger options). Of course I ordered the Mighty Meaty, which had pepperoni, ham, sausage, and applewood smoked bacon on it! Pizza to me is something that's hard to screw up, but some pizzas are clearly better than others. This was really a phenomenal pizza. It had a thin wheat crust with a corn meal coating, and you know I loved all that meat! All in all, the pizza was crispy and flavorful. And most crucially it was not oversauced. Tami went with one of her favorite pizza styles- classic Hawaiian. She loved it, and that was the real determining factor in the Mellow Mushroom's overall score. If you can please me in the beer department and impress Tami in the pizza department, you're going to do well in our book!

On to the FABS scale!
Food- Pizza and pretzels done right. Thumbs up! 23/25
Beer- If you like craft and imported beer, this is the place to go. 24/25
Atmosphere- A great place for families and beach goers alike. 23/25
Service- Friendly and efficient. Our food came out fast! 24/25

Total- 94 (out of 100)

If we go back to Delray Beach, we're going to two places for sure: Dada and Mellow Mushroom!

-Josh